Stars in His Eyes

by Martí Gironell

  “Donna, babe . . .” Jean’s voice sounded distant. “I was trying to get ahold of you before. I’m so sorry, but—”

  “You won’t be here for dinner, either,” Donna interrupted him.

  It wasn’t a question. It was an affirmation. And all the ill feelings that she had tried to suppress during the day she’d spent alone with the kids rose up in the form of boundless indignation.

  She hung up and handed the phone back to the waiter.

  Jean stood there, phone in hand, cut off in the middle of his explanation. Then again, he wouldn’t have known how to explain to her where he was going anyway.

  To do so, he’d have tell her what had been in his mind those past few weeks, the dissatisfaction that had tormented him and that he couldn’t admit to anyone. Least of all to her. He’d have had to go back even further, to two or three months ago—or, if he were honest with himself, if he listened to his memory, even longer. All the way back to an unexpected visit over a year ago that had knocked some ancient memories loose.

  It had taken place one morning while Leon was having his coffee at a table in the restaurant, reading a story in the newspaper about the Vietnam War. In the ashtray, his cigarette was burning down, untouched. The lunch shift hadn’t yet begun.

  “Jean?”

  A man in dark-blue stovepipe pants, a camel coat, and worn-out loafers with no socks patted him softly on the back. A huge smile crossed Jean’s face, and he stood up to embrace him.

  “I can’t believe it! Julio!” He wondered if his eyes were deceiving him. He hadn’t seen his cousin in decades.

  “Cefe! Excuse me—I mean, Monsieur Jean Leon . . .”

  His cousin hugged him tight. Time had passed for Julio, too. His hair was whiter; he had more wrinkles and a bigger belly, but the same grin, the same energy, the same contagious vitality. The glimmer in his eyes had not faded in the least.

  “You know how it is. I’m married now, and I’m on my honeymoon. I couldn’t miss my chance to salute the king of Beverly Hills.” Julio winked at him, just as he used to do. “So I dropped in. I wanted to surprise you.”

  He had done that, all right. But he wouldn’t stay and eat, no matter how much Jean insisted. It had been just a brief hello, for nostalgia’s sake. Julio had to be on his way.

  “How is Uncle Ramón?” Jean asked.

  “Papa died. Last year. He was all heart, and in the end, it was his heart that gave out on him.”

  I’m too late, Jean thought. He had been putting off a visit to his family in New York, and now . . .

  “He used to show me clippings from the newspaper about you,” Julio said. “He was so proud of all you’d accomplished. He always talked about taking a trip here to come see you.”

  Too late, Jean—Cefe—repeated to himself.

  “Who could have imagined that Sinatra, the guy you and I saw together at the movie theater with Eva María, would end up being . . . a friend of yours?”

  “Ah, man, I wouldn’t exaggerate . . . ,” he replied, recalling for a moment that night the four of them had shared at the cinema so many years ago.

  He especially remembered Eva María. He had never called her like he’d promised. In fact, he had never contacted her again. But in the bottom drawer of his desk, he still kept a box with his amulet, his cemí. That little triangle-shaped angel she had given him to protect him during the voyage of no return from New York to LA.

  “Whatever happened to Eva María?”

  “She married the owner of the tailor’s shop where she worked. They expanded the business, left the neighborhood, and opened a store in midtown. Her mom left not long after. You remember Mrs. Buenavida?”

  How could he forget her? María Buenavida. That short, cheerful, nurturing, lively woman. So generous. He still owed her.

  “She went to live with her daughter?”

  “No. From what I heard, she went back to her country.”

  To Puerto Rico. San Juan. To Old San Juan, in the historic center of the capital.

  “Calle San José, number 109,” Leon said to the taxi driver.

  Through the car window, he observed that part of the city with its blue paving stones and colorful buildings from the Spanish colonial period. I can’t overwhelm Donna with another hidden episode from my past. The taxi traveled down the avenue named for the first governor, Ponce de León, parallel to the streetcar packed with tourists.

  We can’t survive another one of these delayed confessions.

  In the distance, immaculate and imposing, rose the church of Saint Augustine. They passed in front of it, headed into the heart of Puerta de Tierra, the working-class neighborhood.

  I don’t have the heart to explain anything else to her right now.

  And after driving over the narrow, cobblestoned streets, they reached his destination.

  I don’t even really know what it is I came to do.

  Leon had the taxi stop in front of a building with a patched facade, with wooden railings and shutters and an inner courtyard bathed with sunlight. Some of the balconies were in deplorable shape; others needed a new coat of varnish as soon as possible. The decaying air of the place depressed him, and soon his apprehension was making him question why he had come. The sound of water gurgling in a fountain in the middle of the courtyard struck him as a good sign. The music he now heard was another, as were the lyrics.

  Don’t live for tomorrow

  forget your pride

  turn your back on your sorrow

  and your dreams will arrive.

  Salsa music was playing inside the building, and those words followed Jean inside like an omen. It was the memory of Little Puerto Rico that had brightened his days in the Bronx, dancing and eating with the Buenavida family at their joyful, raucous gatherings.

  He grabbed the chipped wooden handrail, which creaked under his grasp as he walked up to the second landing. At the end of a small hallway was a door painted a garish green. He stopped in front of it and knocked. He cleared his throat and gathered his courage. Now there was no going back.

  The door opened with a grinding of the hinges, and in front of him a woman appeared, so old that he briefly hesitated.

  “Good afternoon,” he greeted her with his best smile. “I’m sorry, is this the Buenavida residence?”

  The woman brought her hand to her lips.

  “It can’t be . . . It’s you!” She leapt into his arms while she repeated, “It’s you! It’s you! Blessed Mary, it’s you!”

  She pulled away for a moment to look him up and down, still not letting her powerful grip loosen, and as she stared, trying to believe what she was seeing, she exclaimed:

  “Ceferino, it’s me, I’m María Buenavida!”

  Jean could see that life had mistreated her. The wrinkles had eaten mercilessly into her face, making it a map of hardship. Every one of those furrows was a testament to the time that had passed; every fold was a sign, a trace of pain, of hard work, of anguish, of the penury she’d had to endure.

  It had been nearly twenty-five years.

  “María!”

  They hugged again, and the woman invited him inside. The dining room was almost bare. On the sideboard was a kind of altar with candles; in another corner, an image of the Virgin, a table with a transistor radio, and a two-seater sofa of brown imitation leather. Mrs. Buenavida told him to sit down while she smiled and caressed him.

  “Ramón kept us up to date on all that was going on with you. I’m happy to see life has been so good to you.”

  There in front of her he stood, the very image of the Hollywood playboy. Elegant as could be, in a pin-striped suit and a white cotton shirt that emphasized the healthy color of his skin. His face showed the passage of time, his worries, but he also wore a winning smile. The kind she would have liked to see on her own son’s face. Jean wanted to say, I see it’s been good to you, too, but there was no point in lying, it would be discourteous.

  “Are you here to meet him?”

  “Who?”
r />   “Justo Ramón.”

  Without giving him time to react, María Buenavida explained that when her mother had died, she’d decided to go back home to take care of her son. A knot started forming in Leon’s throat. It had never occurred to him that her son might still be alive.

  “Come with me,” María said to him. And once they were partway down a poorly lit hallway, she added, “Go ahead. Justo Ramón, look who’s here to see us.”

  Immobile from the neck down, laid out in bed, was a man Jean’s same age. He bore an extraordinary resemblance to him, though his frame was slighter. Like a photographic negative—a version of Jean dealt a harsh blow by fate. Jean felt a chill run up and down his spine. A part of him pulled away, telling him to run without looking back, but another part made him stay there to hear the other man out.

  “You’re just like I imagined.” Justo Ramón’s voice, unlike his body, was full of life and determination.

  Imagine. That was all he could do. Jean wondered what it must be like to simply imagine life, from inside the four walls of that bedroom papered over with surreal floral motifs. He felt a paralyzing claustrophobia that reminded him of his voyage in the hold of the Liberté. But also of his present. This claustrophobia that had been hounding him a long time, but he didn’t want to admit it to himself, because it had only one solution.

  He shivered and stopped imagining.

  The ten minutes he had allotted himself for the sake of politeness passed while he nodded, recollecting moments from his days in the Bronx—and, above all, avoiding the reminders of Christ whichever way he turned: there was a crucifix over the bed, another on the nightstand, a cross stamped into the cover of a Bible, and another on a biography of Saint Augustine.

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but . . . why did you come here?” Justo Ramón asked.

  “Honestly, I don’t know.” Jean tried to work out a response. “I felt I owed something . . . to your mother, to you . . .”

  “No! Not at all!” María Buenavida waved him off.

  “I don’t think of myself as a generous person. Not in the Christian sense.” He pointed to the crucifix and the books on the nightstand. “If I’m honest, I’ve always put myself before others. And I doubt I can change much at this point. But I promised myself that one day I would return the favor you did me, María. I am who I am now, among other reasons, because for a while I was you, Justo Ramón.”

  “And I’m happy for that,” María said, moved. “I did what I had to do. You don’t owe me anything. You deserve all that you have—you’re the one who did it, you alone.”

  “‘Love and do what you will,’” Justo Ramón added. “We’re followers of Augustine here, as you can see. You don’t owe us anything. But if you don’t want to feel selfish, maybe you should go back to the hotel and be with your family.”

  On the way down the stairs to the street, Leon was still asking himself if he had gone there to settle accounts with his past. The whole ride back to the hotel in the taxi, he didn’t find the answer. Nor when he tried to distract himself, to think of anything to avoid suffering through a night of insomnia, nor the next day, in the company of his family, who were irritated at his unexplained absence the day before.

  What bothered Donna most was all that empty time without a word from him. Now he was silent again, and she knew it would be a waste of her time to expect an explanation. At first, she had imagined Puerto Rico would be like Rome, and he would use the time away from home to confess something to her. Was there another secret from his past, or some crazy new project? But no, no confession had come, not even the night after his disappearance, when Jean opened the door well past midnight and crawled into the hotel bed in evasive silence.

  “Everything OK, Jean?” Donna had whispered.

  “Go to sleep. It’s late, we’ll talk tomorrow,” Leon had said unconvincingly.

  The next day, as though to appease everyone and make up all at once for time lost, Jean threw himself into making plans, not just the ones he had already promised, but other escapades they hadn’t even discussed. Over breakfast in the hotel dining room, he tried to share his enthusiasm—before, he had always managed to. He kept saying how fortunate he was to have the family he had, and he joked with his children about how they had grown. In a few months, Jean-Georges would be eighteen; he still hadn’t decided whether to go to college or look for a job like his father. Cécile, who’d just turned fifteen, wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was turning into a beautiful young woman, and that made her father worry.

  Throughout the day, Donna just nodded along and hid behind her sunglasses, never taking them off until they were back home in California. Only then did she stop feeling like covering her eyes.

  “Why did we really go to Puerto Rico, Jean?”

  Donna’s voice was calm as she unpacked the suitcases and Jean undressed. The return trip on the plane had been rocky, and they had arrived home exhausted. The children were already asleep in their beds.

  The weekend had been intense for the entire family. A disappointment for her. And a revelation for him. Another one that he didn’t know how to share—or didn’t want to share—with his wife.

  “I already told you . . .”

  He was a gifted liar. Once he’d internalized the version of a story that worked best for him, he could repeat it perfectly, never mixing up the details, and it was almost impossible to catch him in a contradiction. His insistence wound up making his words seem, if not true, then at least plausible. His friends and acquaintances had long given up trying to pierce the veil of his obfuscations.

  But Donna wasn’t just a friend or an acquaintance.

  “I know you better than that,” she interrupted him. “Just tell me the truth. Why did you want to go there? You think after all this time together I don’t know when you’re hiding something?”

  Donna knew her suspicions were justified. They were the fruit of countless disappointments and deceptions Jean had brought her through the years. He was on edge, and she could sense it.

  “Did you find what you wanted, at least?”

  Jean looked at her in silence, tried to evade that feeling of the four walls closing in on him.

  For a long time, he hadn’t truly been there. Whole years, in fact. And it dawned on him that now, at long last, Donna didn’t want him around, either.

  CHAPTER 16

  Jean and Donna’s marriage ended quietly in the autumn of 1976. It had lasted twenty-two years.

  “There you have it, Emilio. Your grim predictions came true.”

  “I hate it for you. What are you going to do now?”

  Jean removed a wine key from his pocket. He took his time removing the cork from a bottle of wine he had chosen especially for the dark occasion. He poured two glasses and raised his to deliver some inspired words. He had found an answer he hadn’t wanted to hear in Puerto Rico.

  “What I’ve always done, mon ami. Look ahead,” Jean told his old friend.

  Emilio didn’t even toast.

  True to his word, Jean looked ahead. And soon he found what he’d been looking for, right in front of him, at least for a time. Among the team of servers at the restaurant, there was a charming woman named Karen. A year after his divorce, he married her. Karen was good-looking, exuberant, and younger than him, with a daughter from a previous marriage. But when she began to act erratically and they diagnosed her with schizophrenia, that spelled the end of their relationship. Jean had never had much room in his life for the sufferings of others, and he wasn’t going to put his projects on hold, even to help someone heal. He had always bucked limitations; now wasn’t the time to become a Justo Ramón trapped in the bed of new responsibilities. No, he wanted to remake himself, to become young again.

  A little like La Scala, which was now crowded with new faces taking over for the stars and public figures of the past. This was the next generation of the fascinating, frenetic, corrupt world that bridged luxury, money, and power. The restaurant welcomed superstars
and their pet eccentricities, politicians, athletes, unscrupulous millionaires, and boring rich socialites with ambitious hangers-on.

  The changing times forced Jean to reconsider the business and diversify his offerings. He opened two new restaurants—La Scala Boutique and Au Petit Jean, both with front windows that opened onto the bustle of Beverly Drive. The decoration was a tribute to Mediterranean cuisine: empty crates of select brands of pasta, imported bottles of olive oil, packets of breadsticks, jars of olives, anchovies, peppers, artichokes. Bottles of Chianti hanging from the ceiling, and in strategic corners, magnums of Jean Leon, a brand that was starting to make its mark—not only at La Scala, but in places he had never dreamed of: the cellars of the biggest and most admired restaurants and hotels in the world, on the recommendation lists of prestigious wine critics and sommeliers, and in the homes of eminent figures in the world of wine.

  Jean Leon even made it into the hands of an old companion, a fellow dreamer, who remembered it with fondness. On January 20, 1981, the streets of DC were frozen, but all of Washington was in its finest apparel to offer a warm welcome to Ronald Reagan as president of the United States. The president’s inaugural banquet was catered by La Scala, but more importantly, Jean Leon’s wine was there. Dreaming is free.

  Was it Jimmy or Jean who had uttered those words? He no longer knew. What he was sure of was that Reagan had managed to predict the future that night—even if, sadly, his vision had only come true for two of them: For you, a great wine; for Jimmy, a successful career. For both of you, a restaurant, and for me . . . heck, maybe I’ll be president of the United States of America. Reagan had raised his glass and said to Jean Leon, with a certain solemnity, When we make our dreams come true, we’ll toast our successes with your wine.

  It wouldn’t be just any wine. The occasion demanded the very best from his winery, a wine that would serve to cement the brand’s reputation: Jean Leon Cabernet Sauvignon Gran Reserva. That wine, produced at Château Leon in Torrelavit, his beloved winery in Penedès, the fruit of his efforts and sacrifices, would be known and recognized all over the world after that banquet. Professor Amerine had already predicted it. And so just as, long ago, the wines of Penedès had accompanied the feasts of imperial Rome, now Jean Leon and his wine were welcoming the new leader of the most powerful empire in the Western world: the fortieth president of the United States of America.